Page 54 - GALIET KAFKABEL JOB, KANT AND MILTON: Omnipotence, Impotence and Rebellion IV+

Galiet & Galiet
is not so in The Trial. Josef K’s denouncement is exactly Job’s 3⁄4 the Judge is unjust; yet it does not earn K a stupendous acquittal or restoration, but a merciless execution. Here 3⁄4 divine injustice and divine execution are the antithesis to the Book of Job. Here 3⁄4 the very same premises reach different conclusions derived from The High Court of Whim.
Job’s self-centeredness and blasphemies shatters Job’s innocence, returning him to original sin. In Satan’s irrational realm, Job’s blasphemies in the future shall prove Job’s sins in the past. Therefore, Job’s guilt materializes into real guilt as soon as Job fulfills Satan’s prediction that he will curse Yahweh. In Satan’s wager, a sinless past and a sinful present and future entangle. Job ignores he undergoes a “trial of innocence,”310 which is really a trial of “reaction,”311 to test his present curse-power. Consequently, whatever piety Job may have had or earned by his past deeds returns to sin.
Satan insidiously entangles Job’s innocence and metamorphoses it into original sin, thus winning the wager. In a leap of the irrational, Job’s self-interestedness in the trial proves his self-interestedness in the past. Thus, Yahweh loses his wager, and one can only conjecture how power circulates between Satan and Yahweh. If Satan humiliates Yahweh, Yahweh must save Face. Yahweh must humiliate Job and coerce him to submit to restore him, in order to assert His power over Satan’s astuteness.
To entangle their power struggles further, Satan 3⁄4 the victorious Whirlwind Angel, destroyer of Job’s offspring, and master of the temporal eternal present, commands the Lord’s Whirlwind to humble Yahweh. Unable to defend justice or innocence, Yahweh’s speeches might be Satan’s whispers. Satan, supreme ventriloquist, must ensure Job repents and submits to power so that he returns to Satan’s whispers: original sin. If Satan tries an innocent under the pretense of sin, only Satan can restore a sinner under the pretense of innocence. He deceives every lector in making them believe that Job’s restoration affirms his original piety and innocence. But restoration does not affirm Job’s piety. Job’s restoration is the pretense of innocence, an aside, to distract lectors from Satan’s real stratagem 3⁄4 the scapegoating of Yahweh from The Whirlwind. Job’s restoration is then a double deception and punishment. If Job does not see the real power game in the Court of then and of now, he can be toyed around again and again, despite the happy-thereafter denouement. Josef K, however, sees the power-game, and grasps Satan’s temptation to return him to guilt in an apparent acquittal. If we crisscross both tragedies, Josef K’s murder does not entail his guilt. It entails that Satan or the Prosecutor lost his wager, and must save his Face. If Yahweh loses his wager against Satan in Job, the Judge wins his wager against Satan, in The Trial. In the Theatre of Twilights, spiteful and vengeful Satan kills Josef K, not because K is guilty, but because K is innocent, as he affirms he is. Satan will accuse, test, slander suspects until Satanu wins.312
The most telling case against Job’s piety is his desire to rouse up Leviathan. Job not only curses the day he is born and rails against Yahweh, but also conjures up “the forces of primal chaos to end the whole world along with
310 Lasine, Stuart. “The Trials of Job and Kafka’s Josef K.” The German Quarterly, Vol. 63, No. 2, Focus: Jews and Germans/Jewish–German Literature (Spring, 1990), 189. Please note that Job is confident he undergoes a trial of sin. Job complains that Yahweh searches after his iniquity and ferrets out his sin. “If I sin, You stand guard over me;/You do not let me escape my guilt./If I sin, woe betide me,/Yet if I am righteous, I cannot raise my head,/Being filled with shame and sated with misery” (Job 10:14-16).
311 Lasine, Stuart. “The Trials of Job and Kafka’s Josef K.” The German Quarterly, Vol. 63, No. 2, Focus: Jews and Germans/Jewish–German Literature (Spring, 1990), 189. See also Frye, Northrop. Words with Power. Being a Second Study of the Bible and Literature. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990. 310
312 When Satan fails and loses the first wager, he goes on to the second one. As soon as he wrecks Job’s health, Job begins to be irate against Yahweh.
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